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Manjaro: A Convenient Way To Play With Arch Linux

04-22-2013, 08:00 PM

Phoronix: Manjaro: A Convenient Way To Play With Arch Linux

The Manjaro Linux distribution describes itself as a "user-friendly" version of the popular Arch Linux platform. Manjaro Linux still follows Arch in a rolling-release manner, but it's designed to offer greater user-friendliness and accessbility, complete with an easy installation routine...

Those not familiar with Arch : you are supposed to set it up once then you only upgrade the packages online. It's a rolling release.
Benchmarks (ie Phoronix, Heaven, whatever) are available using Arch
Good luck to Manjaro

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I'm an Arch user as well and I'm impressed with the Manjaro distro. Even to the point I installed it on my work machine as I was sick of updating Ubuntu on it every six months. I get rolling release minus all the bloody tinkering which I do enjoy but not while I'm at work.

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I really liked the concept behind manjaro, but just as they say on their webpage, it has rough edes and is under heavy development still.

My testing stopped with there being no network detected. I don't know if i was expected to manually configure, or if it was just bugged, but i decided to come back when the heavy development warnings are lifted.

Current verdict: Manjaro = Arch done right, but not ready for mainstream Linux users just yet.

The Arch stable repos are synced into Manjaro Unstable on a roughly daily basis. They sit there for 1-2 weeks before being declared stable and moving to Manjaro Testing. Then their test squad declares that stable enough to move to Manjaro Stable, about 3-4 weeks after the packages arrive in Arch Linux.

And this is the issue. There is four weeks until Manjaro users get package updates. That is still a lot quicker than a non-rolling release distribution I hear you say, but it ignores one of the fundamentals of a rolling release distribution. Security fixes come with a new software release. ...

That means, Manjaro users are vulnerable to security bugs for around a month after Arch users are safe, unless of course the Manjaro Core Team monitors every package and pushes those with security fixes.

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One of the reasons why Arch Linux isn't commonly used for benchmarking at Phoronix is that it's more time-intensive to setup...

I'm not an expert, but wouldn't Arch be the perfect distro for someone doing so many reinstalls? You could just script the install procedure, especially now it doesn't have that menu setup that they used to have. Sure, there would be the initial pain of setting up the script. But once that's done, you could tweak the script to specify what you wanted to install (you could put the stuff which changes in an array or something). Then you could kick off the script and then go grab a coffee and come back to an installed system.

Compare that to Ubuntu where there are multiple things you have to attend to during the install. Sure, it's reasonably simple stuff, but you can't kick it off then leave it to quite the same degree you would be able to with Arch and a well written bash script.

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That means, Manjaro users are vulnerable to security bugs for around a month after Arch users are safe, unless of course the Manjaro Core Team monitors every package and pushes those with security fixes.

But that also means that security problems that are introduced in new versions and found within 4 weeks will never reach the Manjaro user, doesn't it?

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The quality of update scripts in Manjaro is quite horrible, one its results was that if you had edited you mkinitcipio config the update script could break your system. They also use SyncFirst feature of Pacman that was removed in 4.1 because it was deemed broken. They still, at very least the Manjaro users, had the nerve to blame Arch Linux developers for being malicious even though the feature was removed around the same time that Manjaro was first announced in git... over year ago. Carl Duff's, one of the lead developers of Manjaro, comments are so dreadful to read that I can't but wish a downfall for this distribution... which probably won't take too long. My bet is less than a year.